In Broadcast - May 2013 - 70


I N T E R N A T I O N A L

WWW.INBROADCAST.COM | ISSUE 19 - MAY 2013

N E W S

InFILE

Massive Data And The Cloud
Makes For The Perfect Marriage?
By Francois Quereuil
Director, Aspera

T

70

he odds of big data and the
cloud converging as a perfect
match are tough to beat. It’s no
secret that the handling of big data
– moving, storing and sharing – is
increasingly becoming an issue for
organisations of all types and sizes.
According to recent research
by international analyst house
IDC, data has grown by a factor
of nine in ﬁve years, exceeding 1.8
zetabytes (1.8 trillion gigabytes).
Recent research from Gartner
offers equally staggering numbers,
stating “making big data something
that has a functional use will drive
$4.3 billion in software sales in
2012. The balance will go towards
IT services such as outside experts
and internal staff.”
Not only are ﬁles getting larger
and more numerous, they’re also
becoming more complex. HD and
other high bit-rate file formats
common today add complexity and
eat up bandwidth at an alarming rate.
How to most efﬁciently and cost
effectively manage big data while
leveraging its inherent value, is an
issue faced by government bodies,
organisations in the life sciences,
legal and media and entertainment
industries, and many others.
Of course, big data solutions aren’t
about ﬁnding a storage dustbin big
enough to keep the lid on. They’re
about exploiting content/data –
currency no matter what business
you’re in - to make it as valuable as
possible for your business. Often
that means transporting data so
everyone has access to it, regardless
of distance and time zone, especially
for companies with global footprints.
Employees must be able to sync
up and collaborate on the same
workﬂow and projects, often in realtime. Industries that have been most
affected by big data challenges need
to transport, maintain and analyse
high volumes of data input and
output around the clock. That old
‘time is money’ axiom holds true for
many global organisations.
Indeed, two of the biggest
sectors managing these data
issues are media and entertainment,
and life sciences. A media and
entertainment company’s stock
is data-intensive HD and 3D ﬁles
that require bandwidth-heavy

processes to manage. In sports
broadcasting, companies have
to deliver thousands of live inmatch and post-match video clips,
with terabytes of data recorded,
packaged and sent to their partners
around the world. Film production
companies need to connect studios
with remote shooting locations, and
manage a streamlined workﬂow that
begins with data ingest, storage and
sharing, and easily integrates with
editing and other key production
tasks. And, they have to provide
similar workﬂows for their mobile
and Internet content.
In life sciences, new genomic
research is adding even greater
demand for big data solutions.
The reduction in the cost of
sequencing is driving the continued
growth in data and, as technology
improves, sequencing files are
getting even larger.
The possibility of easily deployed,
scalable and highly effective big
data solutions in the cloud are
enormously attractive. Organisations
eagerly look to the cloud to provide a
silver lining to host and manage their
big data predicament. In its recent
‘Sizing the Cloud’ report, Forrester
Research said it expects the global
cloud computing market to reach
$241 billion in 2020 compared to
$40.7 billion in 2010.

Promise Delivered
The cloud offers huge potential
benefits including on-demand,
ﬂexible computing, network and
storage resources without the
large upfront investments of
deploying a traditional data centre.
It can streamline workﬂows and
provide a universally accessible
platform to manage, transform
and distribute HD video content.
And it eliminates the need for
sophisticated IT infrastructures to
handle spikes in activity.
The cloud as a means to perfectly
meet the needs of big data has been
tantalisingly close but not quite there
for companies to trust. Until recently,
three signiﬁcant roadblocks have
persistently outweighed the beneﬁts:
transfer performance over the WAN,
HTTP throughput within remote
infrastructures, and size limitations of
cloud object stores. New technology

Aspera’s console dashboard screen

has overcome these limitations.
With high-speed transport as
the backbone, it’s now possible
to enable high-speed movement,
distribution, synchronisation and
exchange of big data, from any
source to any destination. Use of
the cloud also eliminates the risk of
upfront IT investments and allows
institutions to scale out and back
while paying only for the capacity
they use. These beneﬁts can be
leveraged for all companies with big
data needs, transforming workﬂows,
decreasing costs, and dramatically
improving collaboration.
The technology now exists to
remove the transfer bottlenecks so
data can move in and out of the
cloud at full line speed, resulting in
cloud-based services and software
intrinsically enabled for cloud object
storage, such as Amazon Web
Services and Microsoft Windows
Azure. Companies of all types and
sizes can use this state-of-the-art
technology to ingest and distribute
large media files to and from
Windows Azure BLOB storage for
example, and integrate the platform
into media services running on
the Azure cloud.
The conventional way of thinking
for industries to move big data has
been through WAN-based transport.
But TCP-based transport methods
such as FTP or HTTP signiﬁcantly
underutilise available bandwidth
and achieve transfer speeds that
are unsuitable for such volumes,
introducing unacceptable delays
in data movement into, out of, and
within the cloud.
With the technology now here
to leverage the benefits of the
cloud without the bottlenecks and
high levels of risk associated with

transport security and quality, cloud
adoption is rapidly increasing. A
recent cloud-based data transfer
application enabled genomic data
to be transported at a sustained rate
of almost 10 Gbps over a new link
connecting prominent US and China
research and education networks.
This data rate is equivalent to moving
more than a staggering 100 million
megabytes in a single day.
Direct cost benefits should
also not be underestimated as
a motivator for rising use of the
cloud for big data. Cloud solutions
require far less cost than deploying a
traditional data centre, both in terms
of CAPEX and OPEX. This year, IDC
found that businesses could save
up to 70% using cloud solutions.
By moving their IT infrastructures
into the cloud, companies can
accrue savings of $2.5 million per
application due to the cloud’s payas-you-go model, scalability, speed
and security that ﬁts business needs.
Pay-per-use models offer a highly
attractive proposition, with the ability
to scale, exactly when needed.
So, it shouldn’t take the usual
ﬁve or seven years to really test to
see if big data and the cloud are
truly a perfect match. That seems
well underway. And advancements,
both in cloud technologies
and infrastructure-agnostic big
data solutions, promise to only
strengthen the bond.

Aspera’s Cloud Bottlenecks
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